Product Description

Find out what books and films influenced the young writer, his first idea for a story and the true life tale that inspired CARRIE. For the first time, here’s an intimate autobiographical portrait of his home life, his family and his traumatic recent accident. Citing examples of his work and those of his contemporaries, King gives an excellent masterclass on writing - how to use the tools of the trade from building characters to pace and plotting as well as practical advice on presentation. And King tells readers how he got to be a No. 1 bestseller for a quarter of a century with fascinating descriptions of his own process, the origins and development of, e.g. CARRIE and MISERY.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2584 in Books
• Published on: 2001-09-01
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Short and snappy as it is, Stephen King's On Writing really contains two books: a fondly sardonic autobiography and a tough-love lesson for aspiring novelists. The memoir is terrific stuff, a vivid description of how a writer grew out of a misbehaving kid. You are right there with the young author as he is tormented by poison ivy, gas-passing baby-sitters, uptight schoolmarms and a laundry job nastier than Jack London's. It's a ripping yarn that casts a sharp light on his fiction. This was a child who dug Yvette Vickers from Attack of the Giant Leeches, not Sandra Dee. "I wanted monsters that ate whole cities, radioactive corpses that came out of the ocean and ate surfers and girls in black bras who looked like trailer trash". But massive reading on all literary levels was a craving just as crucial, and soon King was the published author of "I Was a Teen-Age Graverobber". As a young adult raising a family in a trailer, King started a story inspired by his stint as a caretaker cleaning a high-school girls' locker room. He crumpled it up, but his writer wife retrieved it from the trash, and using her advice about the girl milieu and his own memories of two reviled teenage classmates who died young, he came up with Carrie. King gives us lots of revelations about his life and work. The kidnapper character in Misery, the mind-possessing monsters in The Tommyknockers, and the haunting of the blocked writer in The Shining symbolised his cocaine and booze addiction (overcome thanks to his wife's intervention, which he describes). "There's one novel, Cujo, that I barely remember writing".

King also evokes his college days and his recovery from the van crash that nearly killed him, but the focus is always on what it all means to the craft. He gives you a whole writer's "tool kit": a reading list, writing assignments, a corrected story and nuts-and-bolts advice on dollars and cents, plot and character, the basic building block of the paragraph and literary models. He shows what you can learn from HP Lovecraft's arcane vocabulary, Hemingway's leanness, Grisham's authenticity, Richard Dooling's artful obscenity, Jonathan Kellerman's sentence fragments. He explains why Kellerman's Hart's War is a great story marred by a tin ear for dialogue, and how Elmore Leonard's Be Cool could be the antidote. King isn't just a writer, he's a true teacher. --Tim Appelo, Amazon.com

Daily Telegraph
`Energetic, vivid and observant'

Review
‘Absolutely fascinating’ (Sunday Times )

‘Not since Dickens has a writer had so many readers by the throat…King’s imagination is vast. He knows how to engage the deepest sympathies of his readers…a bizarre and absorbing story, told brilliantly by one of the great storytellers of our time’ (Guardian )

'The childhood memoir is a triumphant display of wit, story-telling and guts. His advice to writers is hard-nosed, practical and level-headed in the classic journalistic Orwell-Hemingway tradition' (Evening Standard )

‘Energetic, vivid and observant’ (Daily Telegraph )

‘This is the written equivalent of Delia Smith’s How To Cook. And, like British home cooking, the world of popular fiction will be better off for it’ (The Times )

Customer Reviews

The Bible on writing.
Quite simply, if you want to be a writer, this is a must read. Succinct, brilliantly arrogant at times, but he tells it as it is. Recommend without reservation.

Good advice from a guy who gets things done
I'm not generally a huge fan of King's books or his writing style, although he has written plenty of good stuff all the same. I suppose I am one of the literary snobs who Stephen King would not like. This memoir / advice on writing handbook was worth a read if for no other reason than King gets things done and has a remorseless work ethic. Anybody in any walk of life could learn from his example. King was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth and worked exceptionally hard for his success. He did so apparently through serious alcohol and drug addiction which makes his productivity all the more impressive. Latterly, he was also the victim of a drunken driver and really, was lucky to survive. His love of writing is in no small way a reason why he did. This book takes us through some of the seminal events of KIng's career and distills some very good advice on writing at same time.

Motivational!!
Having read On Writing when starting out, I was impressed by its honesty and how it motivated me. Years later, as a writer with my own portfolio of published work, I have read it again and found it still to be an enjoyable, honest and inspirational book about the joy and hardships of being a writer. I can think of only two other books so motivational: Journal of a Novel by John Steinbeck and Wannabe a Writer? by Jane Wenham-Jones.